After you scare off your last trick-or-treater, what do you do with all these pumpkins? Photo by Iain.

One of the first questions that comes to mind the morning after Halloween is, “Who gave my kid a can of snuff?” Sorry, Grumpy can’t help there. But he can give you several ideas with what to do with your pumpkin other than dumping it in the trash.

1. Eat it. Yes, some of the small, red kinds are really good for making pies, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use one of the large, orange ones too. My mom use to carve out the flesh from the inside of the pumpkin the day after Halloween, cut it into chucks, puree them in a blender, and use the pumpkin puree for pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving Day.

Of course, this doesn’t work so well if your pumpkin was a Jack o’ lantern with a candle inside, because no matter how much vanilla extract you add to the pumpkin puree, you’ll never get rid of the awful carbon taste.

2. Feed it to your cow. I once asked a guy who entered giant pumpkin contests what he did with 500 lb. pumpkins that didn’t win. “Well,” he said, “we lock a cow in the barn for 30 days and feed it nothing but chopped up pumpkin. After a month, we butcher the cow. That’s the tenderest, best-tasting beef you’ll ever have.”

3. Compost it. Cut it into pieces, remove the seeds, and throw it into your compost bin. It’ll turn into great organic matter that your plants will love next spring. (If you leave the seeds in, your compost will sprout about a million pumpkin seedlings.)

4. Drop it out of a 6th-floor window onto the street below. You know you really wanna do this. Go ahead. Just make sure nobody’s down there. And if you have any brains at all, don’t post a video of yourself doing this on YouTube.